Epic Poetry: Robin Lane Fox Interview
Readers may be familiar with Robin Lane Fox from his masterful biography of Alexander which was a bestseller when published in 1973 when he was only 27 – an Alexandrian achievement. An Oxford don, he has written works on antiquity that have sparkled with originality ever since including Travelling Heroes, The Unauthorised Version and his 2015 Wolfson Prize winning Augustine. That’s not forgetting his long-standing position as FT gardening correspondent.
“Take my son away, and teach him the poems of Homer.” (Philip to Aristotle in the Alexander Romance).
When Alexander embarked on his invasion of Asia, he took with him not The Odyssey, the tale of the brilliant Odysseus leading his countrymen across vast distances in a seemingly never ending struggle to reach home, but instead The Iliad, the tale of a ten year war between the Greeks and the Trojans of Asia Minor. Indeed, Alexander went on an archaeological excursion when visiting Troy in 334BC. Alongside his close companion Hephaestion, he ran naked around what was thought to be Achilles’ tomb. Alexander’s biographer, Robin Lane Fox, who incidentally re-enacted Alexander’s jaunt complete in his own birthday suit, has written a new book, Homer and His Iliad in an attempt to get at both the practical questions of who Homer was, when the Iliad was written, as well as why The Iliad is so remarkable.
When I met him I was intrigued about his answer as to why it’s this poem, and not The Odyssey, that first captured his imagination – particularly when one considers that it is the latter which is more accessible to younger readers.
“For me, it’s always been supreme. A phrase I borrow from some golden pages by C.S. Lewis when writing about Milton. He describes en passant a quality of the Iliad he calls ‘ruthless poignancy.’ Wow. You know, those were the days when a reader could say it in two words, based on pathos, based on irony, that awful feeling that we feel the whole time is too dreadful. We know it has to happen. There’s very little suspense except in the Funerary Games in [Book 23]. We know how this plot is going to unfold, but the protagonists don’t. And we know through access to the gods what is going to happen. Tragic irony is widely used as a phrase, or used to be, of the Greek world and the Greek Tragedians, but you just need to remember that it’s all secondary to Homeric irony.
“The irony in the Iliad has this ruthless poignancy to it, that the wonderful plot and the disguises of Odysseus (where people don’t recognize him, it’s ironic they don’t know he’s really the master of the household). That is at a different level. the similes and poignancy of the story, the irony, the gods and the range of characters. We’re talking about the two greatest things that man has ever managed to dictate. So it’s a pretty close run, but it’s definitely the Iliad.”
And what of the important question that Lane Fox seeks to answer? Who was Homer and when was he writing? There are theories of course, such as it may have been a collection of poets, or that one poet collected the stories passed down verbally. Thucydides argued he was a blind man from Chios. There are even suggestions Homer was a women (the horror!). The word for poet in Greek (ποιητής – poetes) is ‘maker’ and Homer became known in ancient Greece as ‘the Poet.’ But what is Lane Fox’s theory?
“There will be many more books on Homer, but I believe I’m rather speaking up for a silent majority. Those who write on this have a line to push, totally understandably, and I think there’ve been some very paradoxical discussions putting Homer into the seventh century BC, not, I think, a majority view, but very, very powerfully advanced. I think they’re wrong, and I wanted to give people a sense of what the debate is about, what are the crucial reasons and give seven reasons why I go for a much earlier date.
“Will I persuade everybody? Of course not. You never do. But I do believe it’s correct. And I also think, as I think many scholars do, that this makes us rethink the whole idea of what has been known as the Dark Ages. There’s a wonderful remark by the great historian philosopher R.G.Collingwood, ‘the Dark Ages: dark to us, but not to those who lived in them.’
“I’m a great believer in the Dark Ages. It’s for everybody who either knows about the poem, who might have read Stephen Fry’s really excellent Troy, which was a huge success [in 2022], and very well done by him, and also people who know the poem and love it. They don’t have to know Greek. I hope they find my approach clear. It’s taken me years, and that it will engage them again with the poem, which to me, without any argument, is the greatest poem in the world. That is provocative because the Odyssey exists. The title is provocative because there are people who believe that Homer never existed. I mean, heaven help us, but they do!
“The idea of his Iliad is itself dynamite, because there are the ‘great’ scholars in Harvard and America, who went and did much fieldwork on oral poetry, who think that the Iliad is the result of something called tradition, that he evolved over years. Well you’ll never persuade everybody, and of course they won’t be persuaded by me, but I have to say I think this view is fundamentally wrong. And that’s one of my motives in writing. There are two sides to it.
“Where, how, and when did Homer write? And look, we don’t know the answer. That’s why people are still writing books. But I give you, I hope, a good sense of a likely answer, and also I hope of the alternatives. And then secondly, importantly, I could subtitle it, Why the Poem Makes Me Cry.”
One of the most beautiful passages, in Book 16, deals with the death of Sarpedon at the hands of Patroclus. Sarpedon was the son of Zeus and leader of the Lycians, allies of the Trojans and his mother was Europa. His demise during Patroclus’ rampage through the Trojan lines is hugely powerful, as his spiriting away to his homeland:
So he spoke, and Apollo did not fail to listen to his father, and he went down from the heights of Ida into the grim battle, and immediately lifted godlike Sarpedon away from the weapons’ range, and carried him far away and washed him in the running stream of a river, and anointed him with ambrosia, and dressed him in immortal clothing: and he gave him into the hands of the swift messengers, Sleep and Death, twin brothers, to carry him with them, and they quickly set him down in the rich land of broad Lycia. Book 16 (transl. Hammond).
This passage makes Lane Fox’s top 10 ‘Heroism Highlights’, a somewhat jarring interlude in the book, but important because it does draw out some of the more powerful parts of the poem.
“What can one say? The trouble is, I would just say two things: I do the top ten because my brilliant digital son said to me, ‘we’ve got to have the highlights. You must realize people have a short attention span. They want to know what’s the best.’ I thought,’ all right, we’ll do that at the beginning of Part Two.’
“I have a brilliant scholarly colleague who refers to such things as ‘nuanced paraphrase,’ a wonderfully damning remark! I would say trying to paraphrase adequately those books was the most time-consuming and the most difficult thing. It had a wonderful consequence. I must have read them so often, and I worried when I sat down to write, but I think at the end, I love this book when I was young and now I love it even more. I think every single time you look at it, you see yet more skill in it. So I loved doing the highlights.”
We return to Alexander, who indeed also loved the Iliad enough to sleep with it beneath his pillow, next to a dagger (life as a Macedonian king was not without risk). His copy was annotated by Aristotle, and he himself was said to have written notes in certain passages. Lane Fox’s relationship with Alexander lives on not only in print, but also in film. Oliver Stone’s 2004 film Alexander was based on his book, and he was historical advisor. Stone himself is quoted at the front of Homer and His Iliad. With the twentieth anniversary approaching, how does he reflect on his flirtation with Hollywood?
“Well, the first important point is this. The version to get against all expectations is the one called The Ultimate Cut, which was done in on Blu-ray and is available in America. It has been in Warner’s backlist a massive bestseller. It’s three hours and 20 minutes. And I thought, ‘this will never work.’ Amazingly, that is the film. And The Battle of Gaugamela comes very early. And it is quite extraordinary. Look, it’s a film. I learned so much from being part of a film procedure. And I also know from close association with Oliver, who is outstanding, of course, the top of his tree, extraordinary sharp and clever. I would tell him what we do and don’t know about whatever it was was being filmed. And then he would always take it on board. But he had to make a film. It had to have a plot.”
Returning to the Iliad, before we parted I asked if RLF had ever considered translating the poem, and to recommend a translation for those of us who can’t decide – there have been 15 Engish translations published in the 21st century alone, with this [2023] autumn seeing Emily Wilson’s Iliad, after her Odyssey was well received in 2017.
“Translations are always a betrayal. I do urge people that if they go for a Penguin, because Penguin recognized the problem, the book to get is now the one [translated by] Martin Hammond. If you want to read through the Iliad with a clear prose translation to get the flow of the plot on what’s going on, Hammond is excellent (it’s not the Iliad, he’d be the first to say), but that is a very good starting point.
“I’m not a poet of that nature at all. I admire Peter Green’s recent translation and I will look forward to Emily Wilson’s a bit. I don’t know whether I’ll read it. So much money was spent on me when I was young and I worked so hard, and the result is I don’t have to use these translations. I must put in a really good word for Alexander Pope. I love Pope. God, he was unfashionable in the mid-sixties. People thought I was mad. Now he’s come right back into fashion. But Pope’s notes can also sometimes be so penetrating. So I like Pope and I actually rather enjoy Richmond Lattimore. I’ll have a look, I’m sure, at Emily’s. I just hope that she doesn’t overplay the feminist card. It’s sometimes tempting for people just to put a little too much stress, and I really hope she doesn’t do [that].
“I look at [the] Royal Shakespeare Company in absolute horror here, actually inserting things to bring out a point they want to make. I think it’s appalling that at Stratford you get to see a Shakespeare play and the RSC has written part of it. That just shouldn’t be allowed. There should be an Act of Parliament protecting Shakespeare.”
Here endeth the lesson.
Robin Lane Fox is the author many books of Ancient History, the latest being Homer and His Iliad.
